


those heavy days

by irisdescence



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Muggle, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Childhood Friends, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:48:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26185186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdescence/pseuds/irisdescence
Summary: A history of Remus's window.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64





	those heavy days

They’re ten.

He rides his bike through the dark streets of Godric's Hollow every Saturday, when his father’s had too much to drink, and his mother’s too preoccupied with Regulus to look after him properly. Some nights, he knocks on the door of the Potter home, where Monty and Mia have already stockpiled his favourite snacks, and James is bouncing up and down in excitement because having Sirius over means he could stay up late playing video games.

Other nights, he grabs the ladder that he knows the Lupins always leave out, props it up against the wall below Remus’s window, and climbs up, where he is waiting with a plate of cookies, a glass of milk, and a pile of Goosebumps books that they stay up reading while sitting back to back.

“You know you can always just talk to my mom, right?” he says. “You don’t have to climb in through the window every time.”

“You kidding?” he replies, his mouth full of chocolate chips. “No way. Your mom’s, like, the absolute scariest person in town.”

“Except for yours,” Remus says.

They laugh a little, because it’s true, and he passes him another cookie.

Sirius doesn’t add that he happens to like it this way: that he and Remus can share something apart from their friendship with James, something secret, and that, although James is certainly welcome through the front door, he’s the only one who gets in through the window.

::

They’re thirteen.

His mother’s having a really bad night and his father's been drinking again and Reg is at some friend's house, and although James has the new Super Smash game, something in him wants cookies and quiet company, not button mashing and yelling at the TV. So he makes his way across the tracks, up the street, down the corner, and over to Remus’s window.

But something’s not right. Remus’s white curtains are half-closed, and Hope Lupin is peeking out from the side, glaring out into the dark.

She knows.

His stomach sinks. He hides himself in the bushes and crawls back over to the Potters home. He’d started to think she might, started to wonder if she suspected anything. Sometimes her gaze would linger on where he’d pierced his own ear with an ice cube and a needle in the bathroom, or where his hair brushed his shoulders, and her expression would grow all pinched and harsh at the edges. It settles on him the way the slurs his father spits at him do, and it _hurts._ It hurts that he’s lost this, too.

They never recover those quiet hours reading together in his room. But every Monday morning for the rest of that year, Remus passes him a small parcel of chocolate chip cookies, wrapped in brown paper with his crooked handwriting across the top, always the same message.

_Just in case._

::

They’re sixteen.

It wasn’t something he’d planned. How does one even plan falling, forward movement, unstoppable motion? He’s a goner the moment Remus slides open his window and lets him in.

He doesn’t know that he means to kiss him until the last possible moment, when he feels himself hurtling towards his lips and is startled by their shape beneath his own-- how well they fit together, how strange and wonderful he tastes on his tongue.

His mother would be screaming at him. _Boys don’t kiss boys, Sirius_ . But this is Remus, and it feels so _right_ . It’s nothing like kissing Emmeline Vance at Winter Formal last year, or Marlene McKinnon behind the bleachers. This lights a fire in his stomach, and it feels like there could be no evil in the world, not now _._

They stop, but only when they get to a break in the case. He says _to be continued_ with a little smile on his face and although he should be thinking about fixing that damned car and making sure his mother is asleep before he goes home, he is fixated on that kiss, and how he can get the next one.

::

They’re seventeen.

His luck didn’t last. He can still remember the look on his mother’s face when he stumbled in one night with lips still swollen and hair all messed up, and she screamed at him about family honour and purity and God, as though God gives a shit about a small town boy who likes to kiss his best friend.

He goes to the Potters, and they let him in-- Monty with sad eyes and Mia with tender hands as she cleans the blood from his face and presses ice to his eye, and James who leads him to the spare room across the hall, where he can look out the window and down into Remus’s yard.

And so it is Remus who does the climbing this time – up the ladder, into the room.

And on top of him.

He takes to sleeping naked because then there are no words, no pretense needed in these midnights when Sirius craves his body, just as he craves Sirius’s. He throws off the sheets the minute he hears the window opening, and though he has no words for the shape of his body crawling towards him in the moonlight, he memorises it. He could probably sketch it, if he had to, could write a thousand poems and a thousand songs about it.

He knows every creak in the room, and he’s always quiet, padding silent across the room. It is these nights that he lives for - when they are wet and spent on the bed, when Remus is too tired to climb back out.

Because that way, he gets to hold him until dawn.

::

They’re nineteen.

Remus is moving. He’s got a good scholarship, to a college in London, one where he’ll probably meet a thousand other boys like him in sweaters and slacks, who take their tea with milk and no sugar, who mark up books with cramped little questions and answers. Boys like Sirius don’t get good scholarships, good chances like that. They live and die in their little small houses on the wrong side of the tracks.

“You’ll meet a lot of new people, then,” Sirius says. He’s standing awkwardly on Remus’s lawn, hands in his pockets, surrounded by moving boxes, avoiding Hope Lupin’s annoyed gaze. 

“I don’t want them,” Remus says, “I want you,” and then he’s kissing him, kissing him in full view of the neighborhood, and it feels like every summer night they’ve spent climbing through windows, up ladders, back-to-back stealing kisses and cookies alike.

James whoops from where he’s sitting on his front steps and they break apart, grinning, and Sirius couldn’t give a shit about what his mother or Remus’s mother thinks right now.

“I’ll be back,” Remus says, and the last box gets tossed into the truck and the door slams and he’s driving away down the road while the rest of them are still waiting for the smoke.

::

They’re twenty-one.

Remus is back in town, and the house is being sold. He’d never really changed anything before leaving for college, so he’s packing up his stuff to move back to their apartment in London.

 _Theirs,_ because Sirius is coming, too.

There is a box full of his mementos on the top shelf of the closet. Remus has always been sentimental, and they sit on the floor and go item by item. Old pictures, notes written in class, report cards, crumpled maths tests, faded copies of the books they used to read.

Remus’s head is in Sirius’s lap, half asleep, Sirius running his fingers through his hair. The window is open, the ladder tilted against the side of the house. 

The moon shines through, and the light is soft, and yes, it feels like memories and fear choking his lungs, but it also feels like healing, warm sheets, love _,_

_amen._

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](https://sleepmotel.tumblr.com/)  
> thanks for reading <3


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